


Golden Ghost

by jackiefreckles



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant through season 4, Grief, giving clarke some goddamn credit, love across the stars, mourning clarke griffin, murphy is actually sensitive and i don't want to hear a damn word about it, spacekru, supporting each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:49:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28319259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackiefreckles/pseuds/jackiefreckles
Summary: Spacekru left Clarke behind, and grief is pulling them to pieces.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin, John Murphy/Emori kom Spacekru, Monty Green/Harper McIntyre
Comments: 4
Kudos: 75





	Golden Ghost

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas. I hammered this out in an hour and while I have fics in progress, I've never posted anything before. This is tiny and quick. Go easy.

He left her, he thinks, as the rocket hurtles into black space.

He left her, he thinks, as they are suffocating, waiting for the oxygen to kick on.

He left her, he thinks, as he and Raven stare down at the firestorm engulfing the planet, and he knows no one could survive that. 

He left her, he thinks, when they have algae for the first time, and Murphy falls ill, and none of them know what to do. 

He left her, he thinks, when Monty and Harper have the kind of fight some couples don’t come back from.

He left her, he thinks, when Raven cries with exhaustion and frustration and grief, and Echo stands in that brittle way full of guilt, and Murphy starts to have nightmares and Emori moves into Raven’s room and everyone is feeling broken and bleak and hopeless and Clarke, Clarke could fix this, if only she were here.

He left her, and there are no more days to come with the sunshine lighting her hair golden, or that particular way she she said his name, all promise and portent.

He left her, and she’s dead, and he never told her he loved her.

He left her, and she’s gone, but he’s the one who feels like a ghost.

Murphy calls out in his sleep, sometimes. He’ll say, “No, please, don’t.” He’ll say, “I can’t.” Sometimes he says, “Wait, Clarke,” and his voice is so urgent and so terrified that Bellamy will wake him up, even though the other man reacts with bared teeth and thrown punches, and once, unexpected tears as he yells, “get out get out get out,” until his throat is raw and Monty is standing in the hallway with rumpled hair, hands open. 

When Bellamy’s in the doorway, Murphy whispers in a wrecked voice, “I just want to tell her—“ 

Bellamy’s in mourning when he whispers back, “Me too,” and he blows past Monty, down the hall, past his room and into Raven’s and sits on her bunk. She blinks sleepily at him, confusion giving way to understanding, scoots over and pulls up the blanket. He doesn’t cry, but she curls up around him protectively and pats his chest, murmuring condolences. Emori is sleeping heavily, her breathing dragging Raven down and in turn Bellamy, too.

He dreams of Murphy chasing Clarke through corridors, reaching for her fairy tale hair, but never getting closer.

They talk about Octavia and the bunker sometimes and Echo awkwardly tells him one day, “Your sister fought elegantly. She was made for war.”

They are at the table and Emori’s got algae halfway to her lips, Harper’s fist is curled around her canteen, and everyone freezes a bit. Bellamy and Echo aren’t fighting but they don’t speak. He wants to be kinder than he is when he replies coldly: “No. She wasn’t. None of us were.”

Something calculating is in her eyes when she pushes, “Clarke was,” and everyone stiffens.

They don’t talk about Clarke. Or maybe they do, when he’s not around, maybe Murphy’s whispered into Emori’s ear about how Clarke took care of him when he came back to camp sick and tortured. Maybe Raven told Harper about Clarke saying “I’d pick you first.” Maybe Monty has sighed about the way Clarke fought her way to him in Mount Weather, terrified, determined, because he was her people and they were keeping him from her and she didn’t know if he was safe. 

He wasn’t. She went through hell to pull him from that Mountain and Bellamy knows she would have done it again, damn the consequences, damn the heartbreak, damn the cost, to save Monty and Harper and Jasper and Raven from that place, from those tables and those drills.

He doesn’t look at Echo, instead firmly at Monty and then Raven, already scraping back his chair as he quietly shatters inside again, and again.

“She loved you.” His voice is loud in the quiet, and it’s Harper who immediately replies, 

“Oh, Bellamy. She loved you, too.”

“i know that!” And then he’s raging, the bowl and spoon and canteen and chair crashing around him, no one gets up, or even looks particularly shocked, but Harper’s got tears running down her face freely, just an endless stream, as she watches him drive his fist into the table til it bleeds and breaks and he won’t know how to fix that either. 

It’s Echo who stretches from her chair like a cat, and puts her arm around his shoulders, all business, to lead him towards the little medic station. He doesn’t know what she says, is blind with tears, submits to her cleaning the cuts with alcohol because it wouldn’t do to die of an infection, not here, not when Clarke so freely gave her life for his. 

Not even if he wants to die, or maybe just wither away to dust, and maybe she would be on the other side with her pool-blue eyes and that dimple in her cheek and oh god, he slumps against Echo and sobs, broken, and he knows his voice is filling The Ring and he can’t help it, yells against her shoulder, wraps his arms around her back and cries until his chest hurts and he can’t breathe. 

He left her, and he will curl in on himself with the weight and tragedy of it all.

At some point Raven comes in, and Echo disappears, and the mechanic bends stiffly to sit at his feet. Monty comes behind her, and his eyes are red, and he sits on the floor next to her and takes her hand. Then, finally, Murphy, who hops up on the examination bench and presses his bony shoulder to Bellamy’s. This is an unprecedented show of support, or friendship, almost as important as the time he followed Bellamy to save the princess in the tower. 

“I dream I’m telling her not to go.” Murphy’s staring very carefully ahead. “We’re standing in the bunker and we’re all deciding to go for Raven, and I tell her, wait, Clarke, not you, because I know. And she looks at me, right at me, and then she’s gone and I—“ he takes a very deep breath. “I didn’t even know I cared, certainly never told her, never said thanks, never told her I didn’t mean all that shit I said before she took the nightblood solution and saved Emori’s ass...”

Raven’s got her hand on Bellamy’s knee and she licks her lips and her voice is clogged: “I’ve never felt so sure of anyone. No matter what happened, she was always going to come for us. Hell or high water. Just like she came for me at the end.” She fists her hands in Bellamy’s pants. “I knew that even if we fought, if we were angry, she would still come.”

Monty speaks last: “She died for us. And...we’re really not living very well.”

Bellamy nods. 

Monty’s wearing determination like a crown when he says, “let’s do better.”

So they start the mourning and the moving on like this: they have a memorial, and they each say something, even Emori and Echo. Emori has small moments, she’s seen Clarke sacrifice, and she finally settles on: “She took the nightblood for me. She was brave.”

Echo says, “she would have done anything for her people. I understood her.”

Raven says, “she was the first person I saw on the ground, and she smiled when I smiled.”

Harper says, with a shiver, “she was the one who came for us in Mount Weather. I was dying, I know I was. She saved me.”

Monty says, “she had faith in me when she didn’t even know me.”

Emori has taken Murphy’s hand cautiously and he doesn’t shrug her off. “When she found me in Polis, she called me her friend.”

They are all looking at Bellamy, the way he is standing, with the bottle of Monty’s moonshine in one hand, and he tries to choose his words, sound poetic, until finally he shrugs and says, “she loved me.”

They drink to that. 

It is four and a half more years before they get to the only spot of green on the ground. 

They return a family, something fierce but soft. Raven’s taught Emori all about mechanics, Echo’s been training everyone in Azgeda fighting techniques, Monty and Murphy hide out in the labs for hours, trying to make algae taste better. 

Harper is five months pregnant, a glowing, incandescent thing, but she stumbles out of the pod and throws up wretchedly as soon as they can fling the door open.

The sun is shining brightly, the air smells like burning grass. It’s the end of summer, when the days are warm but the nights begin to cool off, and Bellamy sheds his jacket for Harper to sit on. He can hear water in the distance, gathers the canteens and puts Murphy in a headlock. Echo will stand guard, though there doesn’t seem to be anything to guard against. 

He and Murphy sweep through the grass, letting it brush the tips of their fingers, quiet, and he doesn’t see the child until she is standing right in front of him. Her eyes are wide as saucers, she takes them both in, and then she lands a bomb on his chest when she says, “You really do have freckles.”

Murphy laughs, “What? Who the hell are you, little hobbit?”

She tells them as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world, “I’m Madi,” and then she grabs their hands and they drop the canteens and she pulls them headlong through the grass and towards a cluster of houses near the water. 

She shouts, “Clarke!” and Bellamy’s heart stops beating. 

He sees her, stumbling from a house that’s painted bright blue, trying to tie her laces. He might faint, he might wither, the earth might rush to meet him, he wouldn't know, because he cannot see anything but her. She's alive. She's alive. _She's alive._

The sun lights her hair aflame and when she sees them back, that’s a thing of beauty. She stumble-runs towards them, and Madi’s still got Bellamy’s hand but Murphy has broken free and Clarke crashes right into him, he swings her, she cries out, “oh god, Murphy, you’re alive,” and he cries back, “and they call ME a cockroach,” and a Bellamy thinks that Murphy has never looked happier, or more embarrassed to be happy. 

Madi lets go of him, and she is exultant, “I told you it was them!” but Clarke is way past caring about Madi’s tone and she looks past Bellamy and asks tightly, “Everyone else?!”

“At the ship,” but he is running his hands over her already, humming, checking her over, she whispers hopefully, 

“All of them? Raven? Monty?”

And it’s as if his nod is finally enough, she looks him in the face fully, touches his cheek, puts her shaking arms around him, melts against his chest. 

“I didn’t tell you,” she sobs into his ear, “The world was ending, and I couldn’t tell you.”

“Tell me now,” he clutches at her, “tell me twice.” He kisses her hair, her cheeks, her hands, he pulls her so close she feels like she’s standing inside him, he considers, perhaps, that he’ll never let go of her again. “Tell me,” his voice is soft and urgent.

Her voice is clear, insistent, so much promise in three words. 

He left her, but she loves him still.

**Author's Note:**

> Please forgive my total sappiness when it comes to Bellamy grieving Clarke, and Murphy's complicated feelings for her.
> 
> Happy ending because I love them, and don't we deserve a little happiness this year?


End file.
